11 Great Geeky Math Tattoos

1. Polly Want A Tattoo?

It shouldn’t be all too surprising that when it comes to math tattoos, Pi designs are the most common. The majority of these designs are either blocks of numbers or the basic Pi symbol. But at least one person came up with a more creative tattoo: They used the symbol as a perch for a parrot named Pie. I can’t tell you who owns Pie and has this great tattoo, but I can tell you it was done by artist Shannon Archuleta.

2. I Heart Pi

When it comes to tattoos of Pi number strings, Scruffy’s design is one of the best: She used the numbers to create the shape of a heart. As one Geeky Tattoos commenter pointed out, it works on a second level because no one knows how long Pi goes on, just as no one knows the depths of true love.

This lovely tattoo was done by Steve at Art Freek Tattoo.

3. Sea Spiral

Perhaps second behind Pi in math tattoos is the Golden Spiral. While there are plenty out there, Thom’s version, which shows the perfect ratios of a nautilus shell, is by far one of the most visually striking—and it certainly does a good job at reflecting his stance that mathematics is the language of nature.

4. The Number Game

While the digits making up the Golden Ratio tend to not look as aesthetically appealing as the image of a Golden Spiral, Milad’s tattoo is still fascinating—especially because he ensured that the rectangle formed by the digits features sides in the proportion of the Golden Ratio. Milad got the design because the Golden Ratio is the precise reason he became fascinated by math at a young age, and because the design is the closest mathematical explanation of beauty.

5. A Strong Foundation

Mark’s tattoo might not be the most stunning out there, but it’s still something close to his heart: He loves math so much that he chose to get the Zermelo-Fraenkel with Choice axioms of Set Theory, the nine axioms that make up the foundation of mathematics.

That’s not Mark’s only math tattoo. On his other arm, he has the Y Combinator formula.

6. Have A Heart

After learning her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer on Valentine’s Day, Josephine got a tattoo of one of the formulas for a heart curve, a fitting symbol of support and a great tribute to any loving mother.

7. The Gods of Math

Alison is a high school physics teacher who also studies world religion and draws spiritual inspiration from the natural laws of the universe. To reflect this approach to life, she decided to get the Mandelbrot set, the equation for hydrostatic equilibrium, the equation describing entropy, and the Delta symbol on her back to symbolize the powers of creation, preservation, destruction, and change in the world.

8. Schrodinger’s Tattoo

In the future, Brittany hopes to be what she calls a “wacky, flannel-sportin’ physicist." Her first step toward achieving that goal was getting Schrodinger’s equation for the wave function of a particle tattooed on her back, because it represents the fundamental source of “quantum weirdness.” She says she likes the design because it reminds her that “no matter what happens in my life, there is an infinitely Glorious Plan swirling all about us.”

9. HumbleBragg

Josephine Schuppang studied Crystallography at the Technical University in Berlin. After writing her thesis on the transmission electron microscopy of nitride semiconductors, she wanted to get a tattoo to mark the occasion, but because all the formulas she used were too long and complex, she decided to stick with the fundamental formula of Bragg’s Law.

10. Musical Math

Here’s one most of us probably remember from algebra. That’s right, it’s the legendary Quadratic Formula. Sharon, an undergraduate math student at Arcadia University, got the design to show her love for mathematical formulas and equations. This particular formula is one of her favorites because she learned to sing it to the tune of “Pop! Goes the weasel"—which means this is probably the most musical of all math tattoos as well.

11. Spaced Out

Juan Barredo spotted this lovely set of Maxwell’s Equations on the back of a fellow attendee at the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace Conference in Washington D.C. The equations, which relate to space-time formulations, certainly fit in at a place like that.

Special thanks to Discover magazine’s Science Tattoo Emporium, which is loaded with great math and science tattoos (as the name implies). I know plenty of you Flossers have tattoos and when we posted the librarian and book tattoos articles, many of you posted your own photos of tattoos that fit in those categories. So do any of you math-lovers have formulas or mathematical symbol tattoos? If so, please share them in the comments!